Rhiannon's Family Encounters
In this article, we will be looking at an experience I've transcribed which was shared by an audience member for OVERNIGHT's web-series 'Haunted Homies'. OVERNIGHT is a paranormal investigation team based in America, and they upload their investigations to YouTube. During their 'Haunted Homies' series, they discuss the paranormal to an audience, and they read out experiences which the audience members have submitted to them prior to the event. Once the experience is read out, the team invites the person the experience belongs to on stage, and then the person is questioned about the experience by the OVERNIGHT team.
This particular experience was shared by Rhiannon. As the Q&A segment progressed, her dad, called Tyler, becomes more and more involved. To begin with, he is sat in the audience answering questions but eventually he is invited to join his daughter on the stage. I have tried my best to transcribe the experience and the interview word for word to keep everything discussed as authentic. Where, in the interview segment, you see (...) it means I've cut out a portion of the conversation. I'm always reluctant to do this, and so cut out as little as possible, but the OVERNIGHT team have a habit of going off topic and joking about things; so it's an unfortunate necessity. Anything I couldn't understand is marked by *inaudible*. The interview was conducted by Elton Castee, and Corey Scherer; the two lead members of the OVERNIGHT paranormal investigation team during the time of this interview. Since this interview was conducted, Corey has left the OVERNIGHT team. As with all articles, my own thoughts will be included at the end of the article.
Rhiannon's Experience
"A bit of a backstory first; my dad was super close with my great grandfather and he died right around when my mum found out she was pregnant with me. So he, my great grandfather, knew I was coming before he passed and we had been living with my great grandmother after my great grandfather passed to help take care of her. I was told about this event when I was younger, but as I'm writing this I found out this wasn't just a one time thing; it happened multiple times. So, this one day, my dad is taking me to the restroom; since I was still a toddler, that wasn't a do it yourself task. Before we had got into the bathroom, I stop right infront of my great grandmother's, which was my room my great grandfather had passed in, and I stopped and started waving and saying hi to him; my great grandfather. Now, like I said a bit before, I didn't know this was something that happened more than once, and I knew of it only happening once. In this house, every time I've gone to, it feels very heavy and this was even before I was told about my 'I see dead people' moment I had when I was little. My mum and dad have even had weird little things happen to them there"
Rhiannon's Q&A
Elton: "So, we know this is when you didn't know how to use a restroom on your own"
Rhiannon: "Yeah, it was"
Elton: "So, you were between the age of..."
Rhiannon: "One and two"
Elton: "...zero to fourteen?"
Rhiannon: "Yeah, yeah! Yeah, that works. I was living there with my mum and my dad and I guess I just stopped infront of that door often, which was the room that he died in, and it was where my grandma stayed at the time; and I always just stopped infront of the door and would, like, talk as if I was talking to someone, but there was no one in there"
Corey: "Do you remember this at all?"
Rhiannon: "Not really. I remember the house 'cause I've been there, like, since then multiple times and I remember it's like a weird vibe, but I don't remember that; I was little"
Elton: "Did you ever describe who you were seeing to your parents? Were they able to like...?"
Rhiannon: "I would say *to dad in audience* did I say? *to Elton* hi Papa, so it was like him *points to dad and looks at him* I think that's what I said, was it?"
Dad in audience: "Hi, hi, hi Papa several times"
Corey: "Wow"
Elton: "Oh, so you, you were there for these, some of these moments?"
Dad in audience: "I'm dad"
(...)
Rhiannon: "So, yeah, and then I would just, I would just kind of talk as if there was someone right here"
Elton: "Do you know when it stopped?"
Rhiannon: "I have no idea *turns to dad in audience* when did it stop?"
Elton: "Dad?"
Dad in audience: "I think you just got older and it stopped"
Corey: "Wow"
Dad in audience: "By the time, we left, we moved out when she was three, so we're talking about really young"
Corey: "Okay"
Rhiannon: "Yeah"
Dad in audience: "Yeah. It was down a long hallway, you know, something similar to this and she was passing the bedrooms on the right and she would stop and she would stare in there; and I would come around the corner and I would see her waving, waving and talking into the room and I walk by casually 'hey, who you talking to?', 'Papa', okay that's interesting"
Elton: "And did you ever, like, have an experience as well?"
Dad in audience: Yeah, the house is, the house isn't that old"
Elton: "Do you, you wanna come up here?"
Rhiannon: "Yeah"
(...)
Elton: "Alright, carry on, you were talking about your father, uh"
Dad: "My, it was, it was my grandfather"
Corey: "Your grandfather"
Elton: "Oh, oh wait, it was your grandfather"
Corey: "Her great grandfather"
Elton: "Oh, interesting, okay"
Corey: "Yeah"
Dad: "Yeah, and it's interesting because I called him *inaudible* so, she, she wouldn't have known Papa. I, I would've. He, he died before she was born. The house wasn't that old, built in I think '74 but it's old land"
Elton: "1974?"
Dad: "1974"
Elton: "Okay"
Dad: "But it's old land and, um, you know, it was a regular occurance that things would, would happen. Pictures would fall off the wall unexplainably, alarm systems go off in the middle of the night without any explanation, uh, doors open close; so a lot of activity for something that you, you wouldn't necessarily explain. This is the only time that, that I recall something being specific to a person and it happened to be, er, my grandfather who died about, er, I guess it would be about eight months before she was born"
Elton: "Did you ever try and make contact?"
Dad: "No, not with, not with my grandfather"
Elton: "Did you ever have, like, the desire to or is it kinda just...?"
Dad: "Sure, you know, I was really close to him so, uh, during that time in particular through, through, you know, dreams or whatever, I, it was never that he was that far away"
Elton: "Did that experience help bring you closer together because obviously you witnessed it and you, like, did that help at all, like, did you talk about that as you got older? I mean, obviously you're here tonight...?"
Dad: "Yeah"
Elton: "...and I'm assuming that you also, you're not just here in support, but you also believe in this world. So, did that help kind of create a better relationship between the two of you having this experience?"
Dad: "It's, it's, it's interesting that when I was probably around the same age my parents tell a story about me standing at the base of the stairs waving at the top of the stairs"
Corey: "Really?"
Dad: "And when they asked me who I was waving to I didn't answer grandfather, I said a scarecrow which I'm sure was very frightening to them; but it was interesting that there was that kind of similarity at the same ages for both of us, yeah"
Elton: "Do you ever go on, er, like, paranormal encounters together?"
Rhiannon: "No, this is like the first kinda thing like that. I wanna do more stuff like this really badly, and I say that I would think that hearing about me doing that when I was little has probably influenced me greatly, like, me being into this stuff today"
(...)
Corey: "And so, you called him Papa, right?"
Dad: "I did, yeah"
Corey: "Okay, did you ever, when she was that young, like, show her pictures and be like 'this was your Papa?' "
Dad: "Probably not, no"
Corey: "So, how would she even know that was...?"
Dad: "I don't think she would, right? That's one of those things that you can't quite explain"
Corey: "Yeah"
Dad: "Like she said, we were able to, in her story, we were able to tell him before he passed that my wife was expecting, right, so he knew, er, and he was even still present of mind enough to say oh, you know, she's not, not far away, eight months or so. So, he was aware that my wife was expecting but didn't, you know, didn't have a chance to meet her and we didn't really, she was so young, it wasn't a thing where we'd show pictures and tell stories quite yet, you know, that came later"
Elton: "I feel like you two have a cool bond. I can just sense that. Sometimes I see parents and, like, one of the parents is like 'oh, she just really wanted to come and I brought them', but I feel like you two would be like a cool, like, ghost hunting duo"
Corey: "Yeah"
Elton: "You know what I mean?"
Rhiannon: "Totally"
Elton: "Ah, look at the excitement"
Rhiannon: "Yes"
Elton: "Where, where would you want to ghost hunt first? Better question, why haven't you gone yet? *to dad* Have you ever been?"
Dad: "Oh yeah"
Rhiannon: "He used to write a blog and stuff"
Elton: "What, and you never brought her?"
Dad: "*inaudible* had a lot of people talking about, you know, ages. 'I was born in '80 this, '80 that', I was born in '77 so I, I felt like suddenly I was like I'm the oldest guy in the room, but back before YouTube and before all those kinds of things i used to do this..."
(...)
Dad: "I had, I had a website, uh, and, and did, did some, some ghost hunting around southern Ohio, different places, and uh, eventually I had to move to Columbus and make money, so, stopped that"
Elton: "Why haven't you gone together then yet?"
Rhiannon: "Just haven't gotten around to it. I mean, I really want to and I think my interest in it has got more severe..."
Dad: "Grown"
Rhiannon: "Grown, yep, grown over covid and stuff so strict boundaries kind of blocked that, but I really want to go to the Mansfield Reformatory. That's, like, one of those places where I really want to go and I've been once, like, I haven't really gone in. I've gone to the gift shop, but I haven't gone to go fully into it..."
*inaudible*
Rhiannon: "No, not really, and as soon as I pulled in I started crying, like, to the driveway, like, I don't know, there's just something"
Elton: "Like, crying out of, like, happiness that you're finally there, or crying...?"
Rhiannon: "It was, it was weird. It wasn't like scared, or sad, or anything"
Corey: "You were just emotional"
Rhiannon: "Yeah, emotional"
Elton: "And have you been here before?"
Rhiannon: "No, no I almost cried when I pulled in her too, but I think that's for different reasons"
(...)
Corey: "So, I'm actually curious, so, like, when you were a teenager and you were ghost hunting; what would you do? Was it more of, like, a ouija board type thing, or?"
Dad: "Nah"
Corey: "What was the techniques?"
Dad: "Techniques?"
Corey: "Yeah"
Dad: "It was, it was far enough along ago we had, uh, um, er, we had some early sort of, uh, you know E.V, not E.V.P, but uh, er, the, the ability to, to detect the, the changes in electrical interference and things like that"
Corey: "Oh, cool"
Dad: "Mostly you go to Lowes..."
Elton: "Yeah"
Dad: "...you'd buy one so you could check for where the electric was in the room"
*Inaudible*
Dad: "Right, and you'd take that with you and say 'oh, if it can find electric, maybe it can find electric, static electric, changes in the air' "
(...)
Elton: "Did you ever participate in any séances?"
Dad: "Yeah"
Elton: "So, I'm, I'm curious, right because whenever we see, like, illustrations of séances we think of, like, The Conjuring, or we think of any of those movies; you see, like, eight to nine people sitting around a table, like, palms up. What was your séance experience like prior to being able to just watch a video and see, like, how to do it? There was no how-to séance videos back then. Where was this information coming from? Were you just feeling it?"
Dad: "There was enough, uh, horror movies to give you a little bit of a run I'm sure. Um, so it wasn't, I mean the, the scene of a, of a séance around the table holding hands and things like that was certainly in the environment; it was in our culture by then, um, but that's a lot of what it was. Now, I was lucky enough to have a really cool college professor who was into this kind of stuff who had a, er, wealth of information about, er, erm, you know, sort of ancient, you know, practices and things like that and, and, and he would, er, sort of help us with some of these things at, at times when, when I was in college, um, but otherwise it was just, you know, you get a group of folks together who were interested, you go to a place, and you get quiet, you listen, maybe you ask questions, maybe you don't..."
Elton: "Mhmm"
Dad: "...but it was a lot, I would say it was, it was certainly the technology wasn't there, it was a lot more experiential versus documentory"
Elton: "What's your goal if you were to, if you were to finally, when you, not if, when you finally go ghost hunting; what are you hoping to have happen? What are you hoping to see or encounter?"
Rhiannon: "Anything, honestly anything"
Elton: "Just literally anything?"
Rhiannon: "Yeah, 'cause I already, I already have seen, like, I see things in my House, like, it sounds weird and it sounds like it could be, like, fake but I have seen things"
Elton: "What's the weirdest thing that you've seen?"
Rhiannon: "Oh, there was this one time I was sitting in my room, right, and my sister, she likes to come up and down the stairs, like, real quietly and try to scare me and there's this one time I was sitting on my bed and I was, like, just sitting there and I see a head pop around the corner and I think it's her because that's usually what she does. So, I get up and I go around the corner, try to scare her back, but she's not there. I check the whole upstairs, I, I even go downstairs; she's downstairs sitting at her desk. She was not up there at all. So, that was when I was like 'okay, this is getting a little wierd' because before that night, just like seeing shadows around the corner of the, like, hallway of the staircase and stuff like that. So, that's when I set, I set a boundary. I was like 'please don't' "
Elton: "Have all, have all of these experiences that you've had been while living in the same house?"
Rhiannon: "I mean, this same, together? Yes"
Elton: "Yeah"
Rhiannon: "Not the same house that..."
Elton: "No, correct, but living in the same house together"
Rhiannon: "Yes"
Elton: "Do you think it's possible that your father is the reason why you see dead people?"
Rhiannon: "Yes. Yes"
Elton: "So, you have a different kind of daddy issue. I don't know, I mean, like, we, we talk about this all the time, like everyone, right, everyone always says, like, 'oh, Elton, you're the reason all those things happen', and I'm like 'he's the one who's been playing with ouija boards since he was like nine years old'..."
Corey: "Yeah..."
Elton: "...and doing all those things, I only started a few years ago. So, he's been, like, significantly more open from the get-go and like, so, you know what I mean; it's very possible that your openness for the decades prior..."
Dad: "Yeah, and I don't necessarily know that it's an openness in terms of a greater ability to sense something but rather I've talked about it"
Elton: "Right"
Dad: "I haven't tried to hide it. I've told stories of my own. So, I think a lot of times that takes the, the stigma away. Er, someone who's going to experience something is more comfortable around other people who have already and are not judging them about that. So, as she grew, growing up, and she comes to me and says 'hey, I saw something', I'm not 'get out of here'. 'Tell me about it, what did it look like? What was going on? What did it sound like?' "
Elton: "Was it ever taboo for you to talk about it?"
Dad: "Oh, absolutely"
Elton: "Who was the first person you spoke to about it and what was that reception like?"
Dad: "My aunt, and she was open. She had had experiences growing up living in, in, you know, old farm houses. So, she was open to the stories I was telling. She had quite a few of her own"
Elton: "Now, I assume you're very open with it? You're willing to, obviously, wrote in a story, so you're willing to talk about it. That's good, it's a good way forward. That's, that's nice to hear because, like, we've encountered so many people who are like 'I didn't tell anyone. I knew for twenty years and I only first started talking about this like two years ago', and they were just, like, been holding it in and *inaudible* always kind of like what if other people had these encounters so"
Corey: "It definitely sounds like you guys are like a gifted family. I'll talk to so many families and they'll just be like 'no, ghosts aren't real', 'no, I've never seen anything', 'no, I would never let my kid go and do that', and it's just kind of cool like how both of you and then other people in your family as well has had experiences, you know"
Dad: "It would be a boring life otherwise, right?"
Corey: "Yeah, yeah, 100%"
Elton: "I'd be excited to see what happens when the two of you go ghost hunting together"
Corey: "Yeah, you'll need to make a youtube channel"
Rhiannon: "That is, I wanna do that so bad"
My Thoughts
There isn't too much to go over here as the bulk of what's discussed isn't an experience, but is rather Rhiannon's dad's involvement in the paranormal. I felt it was still important to document as it highlights the involvement people can have, plus it there are a couple of interesting experiences discussed here. Firstly, you've got the discussion around children being able to see spirits. Both Rhiannon and her dad had similar experiences as children where they saw something no one else could see. For Rhiannon it was her great grandfather, and for her dad it was a scarecrow. As for her dad's experience, that could be a case of him having an imaginary friend or he could have been referencing something which could be seen at the time but it could only be interpreted as a scarecrow to a child's imagination. In a way, this is kind of like how an SLS device would detect a chair as being a person due to it having arms and legs. It doesn't mean it's detected something that isn't visible, it's just interpreted visual stimuli differently.
Rhiannon's experience is a bit more complicated than her dad's. Not only does she see her great grandfather, but it's believed she also referred to him by a name which only her dad knew. As her great grandfather had died by the time she was born, this also makes it a little more complicated as it does seem to rule out any potential of her having learnt that name; as discussed by her dad in the Q&A segment. The only rational explanations I can think of here are either a different family member told her about her great grandfather while looking after her, or she said something similar to the nickname and this was interpreted as being the name due to the room she was saying it to along with emotions which could have occured at the time. This phenomena would be akin to when you think you hear an evp say something such as 'hello', but someone else might hear something different.
Regardless, it is an interesting experience and it was great for the oVERNIGHT team to interview her Rhiannon's dad about it as it was more his experience than it was hers. As for Rhiannon's second experience where she discusses thinking her sister had poked her head around the door; I think this is down to a potential psychological trick. Rhiannon says she jumped to the conclusion of it being her sister as her sister would usually do that kind of thing. Due to this potential repetition, I think Rhiannon's mind might have hallucinated her sister doing that because it was anticipating her doing it. I've experienced this kind of thing myself, but in the form of an auditory hallucination.
When I was younger, I would spend lots of time in my bedroom and so my parents would shout upstairs to me to let me know when food was ready or if they wanted me to go downstairs. The repetition and anticipation of hearing my name be called led to me on occasions hearing my name be called when no one was in the house. There were times when this would be because the music I was listening to featured parts which sounded similar to my name being called, and so the anticipation led to me experiencing this. Some would put it down to paranormal activity, but I do think these kinds of auditory and visual hallucinations can be caused by repetitionmixed with anticipation. It's similar to how people can easily see faces in things as anticipating something to the point of hallucinating it can be beneficial.
The final point I want to discuss is the overnight teams lack of knowledge displayed with one particular question. Benefit of the doubt would say they were just filling time and asking a question, but it is important for a team of their status to display decent knowledge about the paranormal and it's evolution over time. The particular question was from Elton to Rhiannon's dad and was the following: "So, I'm, I'm curious, right because whenever we see, like, illustrations of séances we think of, like, The Conjuring, or we think of any of those movies; you see, like, eight to nine people sitting around a table, like, palms up. What was your séance experience like prior to being able to just watch a video and see, like, how to do it? There was no how-to séance videos back then. Where was this information coming from? Were you just feeling it?"
That particular question is, in one aspect, smart as it acknowledges how modern investigations are likely influenced by modern paranormal horror media such as the Conjuring franchise and YouTube videos. However, Elton hasn't acknowledged that the Conjuring franchise was based on the real cases of Ed and Lorraine Warren who did investigations during the 1970s. You could say he didn't acknowledge this because they're one isolated team, but spiritualism has been around for far longer. Claims that you could conduct séances and communicate through the spirits tapping on walls has been around since the 1800s. It was during the March of 1848 that the Fox Sisters first claimed spiritual communication through these knocks. I wouldn't expect the overnight team to know the specific dates, but I would expect them to know séances have been in public knowledge for a long time. Even if they didn't know how long ago séances dated back, 'The Exorcist' was released during 1973; and the presence of horror films is something Rhiannon's dad does point out.
Aside from that one criticism, I think that Elton and Corey did well during this interview. It isn't uncommon for these interviews conducted by them to go off the rails with jokes, but this interview stayed mostly on track and was a genuine serious discussion about the experiences shared. I do think that these experiences can be explained by psychology, and I would have liked to have seen the OVERNIGHT team question that aspect a bit more, but it was still interesting regardless.
Thank You!
Thank you for reading this article! I'm glad to be writing up an experience like this each month as I do think personal experiences shared are an important pillar to paranormal research and investigation. If you want to watch the full video uploaded by the OVERNIGHT team, you can click on the link beneath this paragraph. The next article will document a haunted location in Cheshire, England, and will be uploaded at 8pm UK time on Monday the 17th of February. The following article will document a paranormal artifact, and it will be uploaded on Friday the 21st of February.
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